OBJECTIVES To investigate perceptions of family health service authorities and medical audit advisory groups of advisory groups' involvement in clinical audit and wider quality issues; communication with the authorities; and manager satisfaction. DESIGN National postal questionnaire survey in 1994. SETTING All family health services authority districts in England and Wales. SUBJECTS Chief...

Compared with hospitals, general practice has many handicaps in developing medical audit. This is especially true with regard to defining objectives and outcomes of care. Many methods have been proposed to overcome these problems, and several audit studies that have been published are presented here. Further work should concentrate on evaluating the effectiveness of audit in bringing about chan...

This paper describes the ongoing development of a region-wide system for monitoring the short-term outcomes of total knee replacement surgery. The system aims to collect data from a dozen hospitals, and relies on a close collaboration with locally based surgeons and medical audit staff. The intention is to provide routine comparative information based on a broad conception of outcome, that incl...

B.J 1992;304:231-4 Over the past five years general practitioners have been challenged by proposals from both the government and the Royal College of General Practitioners to fundamentally change the administrative structure and day to day running of general practice.`'Changes range from individual practice based innovations, such as developing structured surveillance for chronic disorders and ...

Outliers may be of interest in their own right or they may merely be distractions from the point in question, and a hindrance to generalisation. In the medical field, including psychiatry, concise summary statistics and parsimonious models have tended to be the main aim of many studies. However, partly motivated by the requirements of medical audit and other political and financial consideratio...

The CRABEL score (developed by Crawford, Beresford and Lafferty) was introduced for auditing medical note-keeping at Morriston Hospital in June 2001. Guidelines detailing the scoring system were issued to all clinicians in the maxillofacial unit. An auditor selected two sets of medical notes from each consultant's firm, giving an initial allocation of 100points/firm (50 points for each set of n...

flags carried in front of them and argued that things should go slower. We shall be looking to see that the Reforms deliver a more cost-effective health service without in any way compromising the traditionally very high standards of medical care we have had in this country. Indeed we would expect the comprehensive introduction of medical audit to improve standards of care still further and I a...

W hen I became Chairman of the Royal College of General Practitioners in 1998, the medical audit bandwagon, largely based on College values, had run out of steam. A new more sinister one — the identification and weeding out of poor performance was running strongly. This was partly fuelled by the Bristol paediatric cardiothoracic surgery case, and the subsequent Kennedy report, 1 partly by the S...